ABSTRACT
A main issue of development for many of the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America is how to enlarge that window into the middle class. Attainment of the middle-class style of life is what constitutes development in countries as widely separated geographically and ideologically as Brazil and the U.S.S.R. The typical poor person and the typical middle-class person are easy to visualize; the first is a peasant in Java, Nigeria, the Brazilian Northeast or elsewhere in Asia, Africa and the Americas. The second is a city dweller in San Francisco, Frankfurt, Leningrad or Tokyo with an office job that puts him well the poverty line. The middle class has been increasing at 4.7% per year and the poor less than half as fast. The weight of a middle-class person is in many respects more than five times that of a peasant. The distinction between poor and middle-class represents the Brazilian and the Russian direction but not the Chinese.
